“Grace, dear? Are you still there?”
“I’m really busy. What do you want?”
“Well fuck you too, sweetheart.”
“Sorry.” She hadn’t meant to sound so harsh. “It’s been a rough day. I ran out of toilet paper, and all the stores are closed.”
“You’re out of Rising Nepals?”
“Ha, ha, ha. Listen, I really am busy. What’s up?”
Suddenly there was a lot of noise on the line. “Well you’re going to be even busier!” Prince shouted. “There’s a huge fucking demonstration at Tundhikhel, I mean huge, and they’re trucking shitloads of soldiers over to the palace. This may be it. People are yelling for blood. Listen . . .” He held the phone away from himself for a second, angling it toward the crowd. Grace heard an oceanic roar. “So get your gorgeous ass out here. I gotta go.”
“Where are you?”
“At the little clinic above Shiva Photo. Great angle on Tundhikhel. I think the crowd’s about to head toward the palace. Can you make it?”
“Are you kidding?” She felt like a rookie being called off the bench.
“Great. Listen. Don’t take your bike. You’ll be safer on foot. Make sure your hair’s showing, so they know you’re a foreigner. And bring a wet handkerchief, in case there’s tear gas. Kay? Haus, haus. Ek mahina!” He shouted to someone in the background. “Grace, I gotta go.”
“I’ll call you tonight,” she said. “And thanks.” But he had already hung up.
SHE’D PULLED ON her All Stars, locked her flat, and run through Naxal, hanging a right at the Durga Temple and continuing past Nag Pokhari. The Jai Nepal cinema, hawking a garish Bollywood epic, lay to her left. On her right was the vast compound of the Royal Palace, concealed behind a high brick wall. As she approached the corner of Durbar Marg the long wall opened, and the palace appeared beyond a high metal gate.
The manicured lawns in front of the pretentious mansion swarmed with Gurkhas, police, and Royal Nepal Army soldiers with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. There were tanks—tanks!—in the palace parking lot.
Durbar Marg was Kathmandu’s poshest thoroughfare. Looking down the street, widened and paved for Birendra’s coronation in 1973, she saw a similar scene at the base of the avenue. Hundreds of police troops waited in full riot gear. All of them held clubs. Many carried rifles, or tear gas grenade launchers, as well. It was incredible. Just yesterday she’d had lunch right down the block, at the Annapurna Coffee Shop. Today the place was a war zone.
She brought the Minolta to her eye and took half a dozen shots of the khaki-clad battalions as they maneuvered in front of the palace gates. Then she grew bolder and moved to approach the soldiers. Most of them were just kids and—as she’d expected—eager to please. They posed for the pretty bideshi journalist with their rifles braced across their chests, booted feet perched rakishly on the treads of their ATVs.
But there wasn’t much happening here. She should probably try to find Larry Prince. Reaching the Tundhikhel Parade Grounds would mean another long walk. Kathmandu wasn’t all that big, but it was amazing how long it could take to get from point A to point B without a bicycle.
It was a straight shot, at least. Down Durbar Marg and around the bronze statue of King Mahendra, past the Clock Tower, and boom. Hopefully, she’d get close enough to the band shell for some photos.
Grace waved to the soldiers and walked away from the palace, trying not to think about the arsenal of weapons trained on her back. The troops along Durbar Marg watched her with suspicion, but no one questioned her progress. She felt like a mouse, tiptoeing past a dozing cat. Suddenly a terrific roar erupted to her right. Her heart leaped into her throat before she recognized the sound: a heavy corrugated shutter, rolling down over the storefront of the Tiger Tops office. The metal shield hit the sidewalk with a reverberating crash.
She reached the Mahendra statue and crossed Jamal. A Thai Airways jet roared overhead, providing a surreal note of perspective. Regardless of what was happening in Kathmandu, the world was attending to business as usual. Grace walked on. To her left was Tri-Chandra College; above it, the Clock Tower chimed. Tin bajay: three bells. The lonely tolling made the fine hairs on the nape of her neck stand on end.
At the next intersection, a smoldering bus lay on its back like a squashed cockroach. Its windshield was smashed, the folding doors torn from their hinges. This was often one of the busiest corners in the city; now it was nearly deserted. A single cold store was open. Two soldiers in armored vests stood in the doorway, drinking Fantas.
She stopped then, intuitively aware of a change in the atmosphere.
At first it had sounded like white noise: the rush of wind through a bamboo forest, or the fading drone of an airliner. But this was something else. These were voices. Not just one or two, but a hundred, a thousand voices. Grace stopped, stood, and listened to the noise swell, as relentless as an approaching tsunami.
The rally at Tundhikhel must have ended. Now the demonstrators were on the move, saturating the broad avenues that led to the palace. Grace saw the front ranks: a vast thunderhead of humanity, pressing relentlessly toward the fragile zone of calm she presently occupied.
Like an image coming into focus, the sound sharpened. What had been an abstract roar resolved into rhythmic chanting. It got louder and louder until the wild electricity of the moment shot adrenaline into her veins and made Grace want to scream with excitement. A million people were marching toward her: students and shopkeepers and smartly dressed office workers with their fists in the air; women carrying signs and babies; street urchins, taxi drivers, teachers and lawyers and doctors. They were all chanting together, at the top of their lungs.
“DEMO-CRACY! JAI NEPAL! DEMO-CRACY! JAI NEPAL!”
Grace paused in the middle of the empty street, dropped to one knee, and twisted a telephoto lens onto one of the Canon bodies. She engaged the motor drive; the film advanced with a healthy purr. Her other camera, a Canon loaded with color, was good to go. She tilted both cameras toward her lips, swallowed, and puffed the dust off their lenses.
Grace shot off half a roll before the prow of the crowd reached the Clock Tower. Jumping up on her toes, she saw no end to the demonstration. People continued to surge out of Tundhikhel park, filling Durbar Marg and streaming down Kantipath and Jamal like fresh lava.
She’d been backing up steadily as she took her pictures, and now she wheeled around to look behind her. The Royal Palace loomed in the background, cartoonlike, a comic book fortress rising above a sea of soldiers. The army was advancing now, moving toward the demonstrators in impenetrable rows. Grace was right in the middle.
Well howdy, she thought. Bricks and tear gas canisters could start flying past her head any second. She assayed the situation. The approaching mob was spreading out; some demonstrators were finding higher ground, clambering onto the roofs of nearby buildings. Kathmandu’s single mosque, a squat and unremarkable building with a small dome on top, was just a few meters away. She snapped on her lens caps and ran for it.
Two weeks ago, Smithsonian had asked Grace to take some pictures inside the mosque for a photo-essay on coming-of-age rituals. It was a no-go; the Islamic leaders had refused to let her inside. Now she was being pulled onto the roof of the forbidden temple by a pair of teenage boys in black pants and knock-off Ray-Bans. But her sense of victory was soon replaced by panic: The mosque was even more dangerous than the street. Every spare foot of standing room was filled, right up to the roof’s unguarded edge. The crowd seethed, and she nearly lost her balance. In a matter of seconds people would start falling off, dropping onto the crowds below.
This was getting her nowhere. Grace writhed through the craning, sour-smelling crowd until she reached the rear of the mosque. From there she managed, with much knee-scraping and bumping of her camera gear, to shimmy down a ceramic water pipe and drop into a fetid alley behind the building.
A dozen middle-aged men wearing short-sleeved sports shirts stood near a dilapidated b
rick wall, smoking cigarettes. They’d watched her descend in silence and were visibly disturbed by her invasion of their illusory vacuum. Grace barely glanced at them; she guessed that they were travel agents or airline reps who’d been forced to close their shops along Durbar Marg and now hoped to wait out this latest disturbance in the safety of this litter-strewn purgatory.
“Good God . . . Grace, is that you?”
“Hunh?” She scanned the group. A tall Nepali man with a narrow, worried face and gray eyes stepped out to meet her. Her mouth dropped open. “Kunda?” She’d have been less shocked to see him in Missouri. “What are you doing here?”
Mainali shrugged, offering a sheepish smile. “Well, you know, Grace, I’m a journalist as well.”
“Oh my God. I am so sorry.” Somehow, it had never occurred to her that Nepali journalists would cover their own revolution.
“How did you end up here?”
“Actually I was interviewing the president of Yeti Travels about the pilots’ strike. We heard the crowd coming. I tried to get back to my office, but the police chased me back. So I ran in here.” He fished into his shirt pocket for a Marlboro and offered it to Grace. She shook her head. “Sorry, I forgot. All you healthy Americans. Rhoda won’t let me do this at home. Not even in the garden.” He lit the cigarette and inhaled with relish. “So. What’s the report from above?”
“Pretty scary. It’s a major mess out there. There’s a ton of people, and about three hundred troops. Lots of guns. Things look peaceful, but it’s heading for a showdown. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets ugly.”
“Do you think we’re safe here?”
“I have no idea. Maybe . . . but I doubt it. Listen . . .” She pointed ahead. “This road at the end of the alley—it leads back to the Mahendra statue, right?”
“Yes. But the whole street is blocked. You can’t get out that way.”
“I have to try.”
They walked to the end of the alley. She could see the statue, a silent sentinel in the middle of the Marg. A single soldier stood on the sidewalk, guarding the entrance to the intersection. His fellows had moved ahead.
“I’ve got to get out there,” said Grace. “Will you help me?”
“How?”
“I’ll duck into that doorway. You walk out a little way and call the soldier. Be very polite. Ask him anything. Ask him when you can go home to your pregnant wife. While you’re distracting him I’ll run out there.”
Kunda balked. “What if he shoots us both?”
“He won’t shoot us. He’s as scared as we are.”
There was a short silence. “Rhoda would kill both of us if she knew about this.”
“Maybe.” Grace suspected that what she was asking was inexcusable. She also knew where this afternoon could take her, if she was brave and lucky. Kunda, it seemed, was reading her mind.
“When you collect your Pulitzer,” he said dryly, “kindly remember to thank me.” He stepped out of the alley and began walking toward the sentry, hands visible and by his sides, calling out in the friendliest tone he could manage.
“Oh bhai! Hajur, bhai!”
Clever, Grace had thought. It’s tough to shoot someone who’s calling you his “little brother.” The soldier turned, allowing Kunda to approach. He greeted the teenager with a respectful namasté, positioned himself so that the soldier’s back was turned toward Grace, and launched into a series of animated queries. Grace could see the soldier nodding his head. She hurried past, moving on the balls of her feet.
SHE REACHED THE intersection and walked quickly toward the statue. Now she could see the line of police and army troops, massed in the street alongside Tri-Chandra College. They were positioned with their backs toward her, shoulder to shoulder, blocking the throat of Durbar Marg—which led directly to the palace.
Facing the troops, filling the avenue with the chaotic energy of spilled mercury, was the crowd. The size of the demonstration was beyond comprehension ; it was the largest group of human beings Grace had ever seen.
Violence was surely imminent. Death might even be waiting. But Grace felt only a dizzy and almost suffocating pleasure. She was totally alone, in what felt like a kind of bubble: fearless, exhilarated, ready. The rhythmic chanting crackled in her ears like the hypnotic beat of a rave. Her collarbone and pelvis vibrated with almost erotic tension.
This, she knew, was It: the singular, epochal instant that photojournalists dream of experiencing. She checked her cameras, lifted the color-loaded A-1, and drank in the air. Nothing, no matter how long she lived or how many things she saw, would compare with this moment. This was history. She was standing in the middle of it. It belonged to her.
A lenticular cloud hung in the sky beside the sun, opalescent. Three birds flew from a tree and swooped above the police line, then veered back to rest under the cement eve of the Norling Restaurant. A blue plastic bag skipped across the empty street and grazed Grace’s sneakers. The time was exactly ten minutes until four.
There was no word or warning. One moment the police and demonstrators were facing each other in a tense but peaceful stalemate; the next, all hell broke loose. The soldiers raised their lathi sticks and charged into the crowd, clubbing everyone within reach. The jubilant chants fractured into shrieks of panic and screams of pain. Dull pops could be heard above the melee as canisters of tear gas were fired into the air, exploding on the ground into white clouds of sickening vapor.
Grace jumped onto a curb, held a camera high above her head, and shot haphazardly. So far, she’d been safely behind the action. But now a second phalanx of soldiers, which had been waiting at the head of Durbar Marg by the palace, was advancing down the avenue. In a minute, she’d be the meat in a rather unsavory sandwich. She darted across the street, wheeled around the Mahendra statue, and was about to take cover in a doorway when a canister of tear gas fell and exploded not ten feet away.
She had just enough time to recall Larry’s warning about the wet handkerchief when a drift of gas hit her. Grace cursed out loud and began to retch, hands cupped against her face. She ran blindly, weaving toward the middle of the street, as the advancing soldiers swarmed toward her like black locusts.
Grace veered sharply right, thinking it would take her back toward the statue, but she was too late. Something struck her violently across the back, knocking the wind out of her. A square-faced, grimacing soldier had grabbed her camera and was trying to yank it from her neck. “Press!” she screamed. He raised his arm to club her again, but she crouched down and drove her shoulder into his chest, knocking him off balance. As he tried to recover she twisted and shot upright, kneeing him in the crotch. He howled and fell away.
She could see again, but there was nothing to focus on. Pandemonium reigned. The crowd had retreated, but pockets of protestors had broken through the police line and were heaving rocks through the few unprotected windows along Durbar Marg. Soldiers were grabbing whomever they could get a hold of—women, children, anyone who had stumbled—and beating them senseless.
Grace’s camera strap had snapped. She had to fix it. The Woodlands Hotel was only a few meters away; it might be open. She ran through a small archway into the hotel’s courtyard and ducked behind a carved wooden pillar next to the glass doorway. The vinyl strap had broken close to the camera body. It should be simple just to tie it off in a knot . . .
She barely had time to complete this thought before the nearby door was jerked open. A viselike hand gripped her elbow, pulling her sharply into the Woodlands’ blacked-out lobby.
“Go! Hide! Now!” A middle-aged man with bloodshot eyes and clenched teeth shoved her toward the reception counter, waving the back of his hand at her. “Go! Go! Down, down, down!”
Grace knew better than to question the order. She dropped onto all fours and scampered into the protected nook between the reception counter and wall. A few seconds later there was a huge commotion: A group of soldiers burst in, demanding to know where the foreigner had gone. “Dekhina! Aundaina! Ma
lai tha chhaina!” The manager was pleading ignorance, covering for her. The soldiers barked again. Grace heard smashing sounds, punctuated by pleas and denials from her unexpected ally.
When the soldiers had left, the manager fetched her. Grace stood up and surveyed the lobby; all the potted plants had been demolished.
She spent a few seconds wondering what would have happened if they’d caught her, but decided this wasn’t a productive line of thought. At this point, she had two choices: She could hide in the hotel lobby until the demonstation was over or take her chances on the street. It was no choice at all. She thanked the manager, promising to return and pay the damages. He wagged his head, certain he’d never see her again. Then she dashed from the Woodlands and through the courtyard, emerging into the mad swell of a full-blown riot.
Grace quickly made sense of what she’d missed. After its initial retreat the mob had surged forward again, driving the troops back toward the palace. The sidewalk outside the hotel was littered with chunks of cement and broken glass. Shoes, eyeglasses, topis, and rubber thongs lay across the street like jetsam, abandoned by demonstrators who had run for cover during the initial charge. Grace stepped in a dark puddle, and shuddered with revulsion as she tracked blood down the street.
Almost all of the women had retreated. This part of Durbar Marg was now controlled by hundreds of men and students, broken into small, adrenalized packs. Bricks and bottles sailed through the air, not quite reaching the retreating soldiers. A few tear gas canisters landed nearby, but the wind favored the demonstrators. The mob was gaining confidence again, congealing and advancing.
A few teenagers had uprooted some street signs, and were using the posts to smash anything within reach. Grace ran beside them as they converged on the traffic circle showcasing King Mahendra’s statue. The boys jumped the wrought iron fence and began tearing the monument apart. It was a well-received enterprise. Within moments they were joined by scores of other demonstrators, who bashed the statue’s pedestal and uprooted the sickly plants surrounding it.
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